1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to online search and electronic commerce, and more specifically, to comparison shopping of pricing and other purchase information regarding non-physical, time-sensitive, fixed-capacity goods, e.g., airline seats, hotel rooms, rental cars, and events, as well as presentation, e.g., display, of same.
2. Description of the Related Art
The pricing of various products can differ significantly depending upon where and how those products are purchased. Even if a consumer shopping online is looking at exactly the same product, the pricing and purchase terms for that product will often vary significantly depending upon where and how the product is purchased.
This is especially true for non-physical goods and services, including fixed-capacity, time-sensitive items such as airline seats, hotel rooms, rental cars, sporting events and concerts. These ‘perishable capacity’ items have high fixed costs, low variable costs, and minimal residual value if the capacity is not used by the set date and time. In order to maximize sales before the capacity perishes, sellers of these items often market and allocate capacity through many different distribution channels, and give distributors the ability to discount or mark up prices. This results in prices and purchase terms that usually vary significantly across, different merchants' web sites, and vary from the pricing and purchase terms offered by the supplier on their own web site.
For example, an online shopper may find that the price for the same hotel room on the same date will vary by 50-100% depending upon which web site the shopper uses to reserve or purchase the hotel room. The hotel may give certain web sites particularly attractive prices in order to get premium placement and more sales. In addition, different sites will set different cancellation policies for the same room on the same date.
Information on perishable capacity goods can be divided into product information and purchase information. Product information is fairly static, and is consistent across different online merchants and suppliers. For perishable capacity goods, examples of product information would be a seat on a specific scheduled flight, a hotel room on a specific night, or a concert seat on a certain evening. For a hotel room, detailed product information might include the hotel name, address, description and room types.
While product information is consistent, purchase information usually varies significantly from web site to web site. The same airline seat on the same flight may be purchased in many different combinations of price, cancellation penalties, and frequent flyer points. In the case of a hotel room, detailed purchase information includes pricing, cancellation/return policies, taxes and fees, payment process, frequent guest points, promotions/rewards, etc. As a result, even if a shopper knows the product they want to purchase, they may still need to go to many different web sites to find the purchase terms that fit them best and provide the most value before they decide where and how they will buy that product.
Shoppers could be better served if they could view in one place purchase information aggregated from a wide variety of sellers, especially if this information is standardized for shoppers to they can easily make side-by-side comparisons. Shoppers could then easily find the combination of pricing and other purchase terms that would specifically suit their needs, and they would be pointed to the web site where they could obtain those terms and complete their purchase.
Comparison shopping web sites have aggregated purchase information for various physically-delivered goods, such as cameras, DVDs, and other electronics. However, it is much more difficult for comparison shopping sites to aggregate purchase information on perishable capacity goods, such as travel and events, for several reasons. First, pricing and cancellation terms change constantly, partly due to yield management systems that adjust pricing dynamically depending upon demand, making it difficult for any aggregator to maintain and display updated, comprehensive data. Second, suppliers have struck a wide range of deals with resellers, or ‘merchants’, who will often set their own pricing, cancellation policies and other purchase terms. For example, sites define and display these terms differently, in a non-standard way, making it very hard to compare terms across different sites. Likewise, it is difficult to compare the prices and purchase terms side-by-side without going from site to site.
Third, some major online travel merchants and suppliers are unwilling to participate voluntarily in comparison shopping services. The omission of these major brands would be noticeable for shoppers, reducing their confidence in the service's comprehensiveness.
Various aggregators have tried different solutions to provide shoppers with aggregated purchase information for travel and other non-physical goods. However, these services have not solved the problems listed above: they do not aggregate information from a sufficient number of sites; they do not compare and display detailed purchase terms, such as taxes/fees, cancellation policies and payment terms; they don't standardize purchase terms for comparison; and they don't include information on all the major merchants and suppliers.
Hence, there is a need for a system and a method for collecting, normalizing, and presenting data for non-physical, time-sensitive, fixed-capacity goods for ease of comparison and/or other analysis.